It seems that rock'n'roll is no longer paying the bills for some people. Billy Bob Thornton spent the summer out on the road with his band, playing to half-empty houses as he worked out his rock star fantasy issues. Truth be told, his live show isn't too bad, but Thornton should be attending to his movie career right now. Mr Woodcock, after his Bad News Bears and School For Scoundrels remakes, counts as the third movie in a row wherein he has abused his right to channel the cantankerous spirit of Walter Matthau.

He should look around him. While he's out truck-stoppin' and honky-tonkin, his buddy Dwight Yoakam's making more movies than albums. And Rob Zombie, - who once fronted a band, White Zombie, named after an old horror movie, and recently made a film named after another old horror movie (Halloween, although there was no further resemblance) - is now a full-blown Hollywood director.

It's fading everywhere else too, as record stores close because of internet downloads, and concert ticket-price inflation outstrips similar trends in gasoline and first-rung home purchases. Maybe this explains Julie Taymor's Across The Universe, another one of those cinematic crap-outs that tend to result when the Beatles' lawyers make a deal for the exclusive filmic use of The Fabs' back catalogue. The last time they tried this out was 1978, with Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the inane All This And World War II. A splendid time was guaranteed for absolutely no one. Picture yourself in a boat on a river. Called Shit Creek.

Still, with the tightening belts in the music business of late, perhaps this horrible idea bodes well for the back catalogues of other fading rock stars currently on their uppers, which could form the basis for ghastly movies of equal or greater conceptual dubiousnness.

For example, I can picture a very grim Béla Tarr-ish nightmare movie based on the complete works of The Fall, or perhaps Throbbing Gristle. You could get about 10 Play For Todays out of Never Mind The Bollocks (Pitch meeting: "She's this girl from Birmingham, see? And she just had an a-bore-SHUN!, right?"). Our more pretentious and tin-eared directors - the legatees of Ken Russell - might film prog-rock classics such as In The Court Of The Crimson King, Tales From Topographic Oceans or The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.

Perhaps best of all would be a wholesale transfer of George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic-Brides of Dr Funkenstein-Bootzilla universe from vinyl to celluloid, since it's a wholly coherent, semi-cinematic universe-cum-worldview already, and would lend itself splendidly to visualisation, what with all those planet-sized afros, codpieces, platform space-walk booties and ghetto-based Muthaships.

But in the mean time, will someone please throw a net over Julie Taymor and whichever moron from Apple Corps gave this mess the green light? Maxwell's Silver Hammer was more fun.